The Couple in the Cage

A witty satire about cultural stereotyping In a series of 1992 performances Coco Fusco and performance cocreator Guillermo GómezPeña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as undiscovered AmerIndians locked in a golden cage an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives Presented eight times in four different countries these simple performances evoked various responses the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didnt find the idea of natives locked in a cage objectionable This provocative video directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia suggests that the primitive is nothing more than a construction of the West and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies